I didn't think a town could sue an official under these circumstances. It's routine around here for lawsuits to claim a zoning board, building inspector, or other official gave out a permit that wasn't supposed to be granted. The government body as such is the defendant. Individual government employees are not liable to the town or the plaintiff.

wildcardjack:I'm missing a step somewhere. They were moving debris from New York to be shredded? Sounds like a job for a hundred local mulch piles. The step I'm missing probably involves corruption.

"upstate" NY. even with a conservative estimate of say anywhere that is an hour north of NYC, hauling debris hundreds of miles for disposal sounds inefficeint as hell unless maybe there were known haz mat issues and permitting issues that people were trying to avoid.

I think this kind of wacky-ass thing is part of Pennsylvania having so many tiny municipalities with so much power. There aren't consistent rules, so it's damn hard to comply with them, and there may not be enough people in some townships that know what the fark they're doing to even attempt to apply them reasonably.

I've posted these maps before; here's a map of the municipalities in Schuylkill County, PA - blue are CDPs so aren't municipalities:

CSB:Years back I was building a new bridge/roadway in Hillsborough, NJ. Bypass of an existing road/bridge, rip out the old when the new one was completed. The new route was through old farmland that the DOT bought years ago in anticipation of this project.

DOT spec requires that you strip out and save all top soil (no reason to waste topsoil by putting a road right on it), got to strip down to compact-able material. But an expected 6" thickness of topsoil turned into 3-5' of top soil. I ended up with a giant mountain of topsoil, maybe 10-15,000 cubic yards or so. I was going to need MAYBE 1000 to do the replanting at the end of the project.

All the locals wanted that topsoil. But I couldn't sell any of it because it belonged to NJDOT. So after I refused to sell to a few pissed off assholes, suddenly the city and county police started showing up. Seems they were getting a LOT of reports that I was illegally selling top soil without a permit, plus allowing to topsoil to be shipped illegally out of the township.

NJDOT told them to piss off, it was their topsoil, and they'd take it where ever the hell they wanted. I think they ended up trucking it all out of county out of spite.